DVD Review: ‘Fruitvale Station’
★★★★☆ Early on New Year’s Day, 2009, 22-year-old Oakland, California resident Oscar Grant was shot in the back by a police officer following a...
★★☆☆☆ “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,” Percy Shelley once wrote in his sonnet England in 1819. He was firing his barbs at King George III but the words could just as well be used for any number of English monarchs including Henry VIII.
★★★★★ Turkish master director Nuri Bilge Ceylan returns to the Cannes Croisette with About Dry Grasses, a wonderful wintry meditation on male fragility and the way we often make our own hells and then deceive ourselves that we’re trapped.
★★★★☆ From sub-Saharan Africa to Afghanistan, Syria to Iraq and Iran, the climate crisis, drought, war, and oppression has created a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. It is treated as an ethical conundrum, but it isn’t. Either we wish to save those who are in danger of dying, or all our talk of human rights is just so much hot air. This is the core concern of Green Border.
★★★★☆ With Luca Guadagnino’s terrific Challengers, the acclaimed director of Call Me By Your Name brings us the sub-genre we never knew we needed: the erotic tennis thriller.
★★☆☆☆ Directors Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s “Abigail” mashes up crime caper and monster movie, but fails to deliver fear or humor. Spoilery trailers and unoriginal characters overshadow promising elements, resulting in a dull, lifeless experience lacking creativity and wit.
★★☆☆☆ Maïwenn’s French period drama Jeanne du Barry is the perfect opening salvo for the 76th Cannes Film Festival. It is as glitzy and gaudy as the festival itself, with its vacuous politics drowned out by the thunderous sound of it slapping its own back.
★★★★☆ Early on New Year’s Day, 2009, 22-year-old Oakland, California resident Oscar Grant was shot in the back by a police officer following a...
★★☆☆☆ After numerous attempts at translating its time-sensitive story from the small screen to the multiplex fell through, Kiefer Sutherland’s battle-hardened Jack Bauer makes...
★★★☆☆ Around fifteen minutes into Yann Gonzalez’s You and the Night (2013), ex-footballer Eric Cantona is giving a lengthy monologue about the enormity of...
★★☆☆☆ Skip Kite’s Tony Benn: Will and Testament (2014) is a disappointing piece of Teflon ‘non-cinema’ that may well prove a mystery both to...
★★★☆☆ The American writer Henry Miller once said that he hated writing but he loved having written, and it would seem he had a...
★★★★☆ There are a series of events from a country’s recent past that illuminate with the ferocity of a burning church. The perfect storm...
★★★☆☆ Familial waters run especially deep in Dave McKean’s haunting new drama Luna (2014), which featured in the experimental Vanguard strand of this year’s...
★★☆☆☆ Of all the monsters that lurk amongst the shadows zombies have somehow prevailed, enduring where other ghouls have fallen, and in the process...